Jane Yeh

Marabou

Reviews

The Independent on Sunday:

"Yeh's poetry, flitting from one thought to the next, is compact and funny (peculiar and ha ha). Marabou gives voice to the trapped: a Pompeiian priest caught by Vesuvius, 17th-century royals 'laced taut / As an archer's bow', women in a Watteau painting 'swaddled in frocks'....

Yeh has serious fun with her material. There is an alert, impish intelligence evident in these poems' bizarre first lines ('It seems unfair to the sheep', 'First I blindfolded the revolting cat'), their twists and turns, the startling imagery ('Boats landed at Hastings like bats coming home / Their noses questioned me pointedly') and the accompanying handful of notes, one of which reveals the unreliability of a poem's details. Concealment is another theme, with pieces about teenage spies and water diviners....

Marabou is fresh and surprising. If only all first books were this unusual."

"Every poem in this impressive first collection is an intelligent firework, taking off energetically to pursue an unexpected and satisfactory path.... She has the gift that marks the true poet: simple words and sentences crackle into life the moment she touches them....

Her account of 'Adultery', written in the persona of the adulteress, is comic, painful and precise.... Her poems are the product of a great deal of artifice, and highly imaginative. With equal conviction but in a very different style, she writes in the persona of two European princesses, who are marrying the Kings of Spain and France in 'Double Wedding, 1615'.... Such writing has a classical perfection, witty because of its precision, emotionally as held-in as the princesses themselves....

There are few limits to Yeh's powers of impersonation. In other poems she is Ook the Owl (cast to play an owl in the first Harry Potter film), Oscar Wilde, the sheep culled in the foot-and-mouth outbreak, a group of Chinese students sent by Mao Tse-tung to Paris to cure them of their cultural limitations. Improbable as all these may sound, her poise and inventiveness allow her to encompass them movingly....

Yeh's range is Jacobean; comedy, tragedy and extravagance are all within reach; she is highly educated, doesn't pretend otherwise, but she remains entirely unforbidding.

In 'Blue China', her fondness for recondite information is expressed wittily through fanciful porcelain star signs (the speaker is 'born under Sèvres' with 'Delft in retrograde, / Wedgwood rising'), and her dense descriptions are compelling."

"The poems...jump out, not by seeming more natural than one would expect, but by being mannered and artificial in a way that turns such epithets to compliments....

While she writes dramatic monologues, her own idiosyncratic style is always sparking off her adopted idiom and assumptions. Thus the speaker of 'Paris, 1899' is, and is not, Oscar Wilde in his last days, but manifests a sort of melancholy Wilde-Yeh hybrid. The living corpse in 'Monster', coming back 'With a trash artist's vengeance, hieratic in eyeliner', is one third Yeh, one third mummy and one third Norma Desmond....

[In 'Substitution',] there's a perceptive tale of jealousy and imitation lurking beneath weirdery, and a witty and original voice shaping all the quirks. Yeh's talent for arresting first sentences, and for subsequent sentences that read like them, is there in 'Cumbria'....

Yeh's more distant perspectives, the ability to see things pass 'in geological time' or in the lifetime of an object, the way she will register how a radiometer responds to events, end up impressing almost as much as the more overt oddities. Yeh's shifting and unnatural world may not be a bad guide to the one the rest of us inhabit."

"[J]esterlike, modest in office but extreme in detonation.... Marabou is willful of idiom and ideology: self-confidence looks good in poems like these....

In the end, the showiest, most vulnerable moments hold their shape best, staked as they are against the consequences of not holding one’s shape.... When Yeh calls herself 'an original / Bit of nonsense, your doll,' the pet name seems perfect, chancy and slighting and, with no apologies, empowering."

" 'I've gotten nothing for weeks,' writes a deserted woman. But the imagery takes off: 'When your letter comes, dogs will bark / Up and down the street. The tomatoes in the garden / Will explode like fireworks'.... This is part of the drama, and drama is Yeh's style.

This is a very unusual and powerful imagination with the witty linguistic skill to match.

It yokes together heterogeneous ideas and explores a full range of territory from the Renaissance to the Pennines and seaside resorts.

To enjoy it you'll occasionally need a little of The Times crossword puzzler's patience, but it will be rewarding and give insights into a rich experience of being human."

From the Whitbread Poetry Award judges' citation:

"It is hard to believe this is her first collection: technically agile, packed with sly humour and endlessly readable."

"Yeh announces herself as a bold, seductively moody practitioner of the dramatic monologue in Marabou, her impressive first book.

Yeh’s poetic acumen ensures that these poems focus not on the eccentricity of their subject matter but on the dilemma of creating a voice....

Readers will experience something akin to vertigo in Yeh’s audacious enjambments, which, in their sudden swerving, add another jolt to her verbal intensity....

Yeh’s masterful ventriloquism often suggests the liberty and thrill of inhabiting multiple identities."

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From Publishers Weekly (US):

"Yeh creates spectacular, lyrical costume dramas of yearning,

existential fears and loneliness, casting herself as Ook the Owl from the Harry Potter films ('fluffed and plucked, like a beauty-pageant winner / Between takes'), a woman mystically controlled by fine porcelain ('Delft in retrograde, / Wedgwood rising'), a royal portrait consumed by flames, and a Chinese student in Paris in 1919, 'broken-hearted and longing for the softest of places.'....

Yeh stretches her lines from the courts of Renaissance Europe to the driveways and groves of contemporary suburbia in her search for a language as vivid as desire itself....

Her symphonic, pressurized style finds sources in Sylvia Plath, in the aesthetes of the 1890s and in the playwrights of the 17th century, though the resulting synthesis could belong only to a poet of Yeh's uneasy, information-overloaded generation."